Our Friend the Literary Hedgehog

There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.'

Thus spake literary critic Isaiah Berlin in a famous 1951 essay about the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who he considered a classic hedgehog: a writer with a singular vision and a focused intensity. Berlin continues:

... there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel -- a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance -- and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle.

I was reminded of this classic formulation by a new article in the Jewish Daily Forward by Robert Zaretsky called Sometimes Isaiah Berlin Felt Like a Fox, Sometimes He Felt Like a Hedgehog. Just as Berlin analyzed Tolstoy's animal spirit (and found an odd mixture of hedgehog and fox), Zaretsky attempts to analyze Isaiah Berlin himself and determines that he was too pluralistic to be a hedgehog.

That there exists a single explanation or a sole truth for why the world is the way it is, and why we do what we do, is a deeply compelling claim. Berlin nevertheless believed it to be a siren call we must resist. First, it makes for failed art. When literature trumps theory, we find ourselves in the presence of a Tolstoy; when theory trumps literature, we are left with Ayn Rand.

However, we can be foxes and hedgehogs on many levels at once, and I think Zaretsky calcifies the distinction when he suggests that a pluralist must be a fox. I think the determining factor between a hedgehog and a fox has more to do with a person's style of thinking than with their metaphysical beliefs. The Pragmatist philosopher William James was a pluralist to the bone, of course -- and yet William James pursued his pluralism like a hedgehog until his dying day. As hedgehogs always do.

In one sense, as Zaretsky emphasizes in his article, a hedgehog is a monist and a fox is a pluralist. But in another sense, a hedgehog is simply single-minded about something, anything, while a fox exists in a passive mental state, observing and reacting rather than projecting a strong vision of reality. Hedgehogs make good engineers, of course, and foxes tend to excel in sales. Since good writing can involve engineering or salesmanship, hedgehogs and foxes both have shots at making it in the literary world.

I've written about hedgehogs and foxes before on Litkicks, particularly with reference to two independent publishers I used to observe in New York City, one of whom was a classic hedgehog, the other a classic fox. I determined that, for better or worse (usually worse), my own style as an independent writer and self-publisher is to be a hedgehog to an extreme degree. I submit as evidence the fact that I have been running this website Literary Kicks for nearly 19 years, for a reason nobody has yet figured out, all these years barely lifting my head up to notice the world flying by me. That's how we hedgehogs roll.

It's interesting to note that, while foxes show up in many myths and fables and folk tales, the Isaiah Berlin essay provides one of only two well-known cultural reference points for the hedgehog (the other, of course, is a video game character). It occurred to me to do a little reading about hedgehogs, who turn out to be cute little creatures. Their typical life span is 2 to 7 years, which is pretty sad (and which is about the life span of a typical Brooklyn writing career). No idea whether these creatures like Tolstoy or not, but I imagine they do.

4 Responses to "Our Friend the Literary Hedgehog"

by Wojciech on Wednesday, March 6, 2013 07:24 pm

I don't want to be a fox, too smart. I don't want to be a hedgehog, too cute. I don't want to be a cat, too many lives. I don't want to be a dog, too dumb. I'd like to be a goat, so whenever i get hungry i won't have to be too picky.

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All the Beat writers inspired themselves with doppelgängers, authentic hipsters who embodied their ideals with great authenticity. Jack Kerouac had Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs had Herbert Huncke ... and Allen Ginsberg had Carl Solomon.

Reading is confrontation. At the end of a good book, you may decide to change your life, and a reader or writer is somebody for whom that possibility is always open. This is why a person who discovers a great work of literature (or music, or art, or any other form of creative expression) often appears for the moment like a crazed animal, twitching and mumbling, incomprehensible. Don't talk to this person -- give them time -- they are emerging from some cocoon right now, and you are an unwelcome witness ...

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In Max Beerbohm's short story, Enoch Soames is an unsuccessful writer and hanger-on in the London cafe scene in the 1890s. Enoch is frustrated that no one recognizes his genius, so he makes a deal with the devil to go forward in time and read about himself in the future.

The movies are over, J.K. Rowling has moved on to adult fiction, and yet here I am, lying curled between the couch and the heater, pinching the fat inner spine of The Goblet of Fire between my thumb and forefinger. This is my fifth time. As a teenager, I used to read by closet-light, flipping back to the first chapter immediately after finishing the last, as if expecting something new to happen. Only in Harry’s world could such an enchanted book exist ...

"One cannot read a book: one can only reread it." -Vladimir Nabokov

There is something akin to magic in reading a novel for the first time: the first brush with a new world of characters and creatures is thrilling to imagine; each turn of the page lures us deeper into the mystery of the dream; and, by the end, we arrive at a catharsis of completion and knowing.

Once the mystery is solved, however, the story does not lose its power. In rereading, one can explore the text for hidden delights tucked into each book, free from the burden of mystery and with a keener eye for dramatic irony. Throughout the series, nods and winks to future happenings and cross-textual connections shape the rest of Rowling’s ever-expanding, ever-darkening fantasy world. With a world so vast, it’s difficult to catch it all in one take.